Oops! Tim Cook tweets photo of Mac production line running Windows

Well, there’s apparently one good thing Microsoft’s Windows is good at: running the software necessary to manufacture Apple’s Mac computers.

 And the messenger of this information? Apple chief executive Tim Cook himself. On Thursday, Cook tweeted a photo of himself touring Apple’s Austin, Texas production line where the Apple Mac Pro is manufactured:

The problem? Right behind Cook is an iMac—and it’s clearly running Windows.
Cook apparently didn’t notice his glitch. This could be a case of Twitter naivete, as Cook only has 64 tweets to his name, and he may not realize the full impact of his Twitter megaphone. His photos are favorited and retweeted thousands of times, but just a few people noticed the Windows issue. Those people, however, began commenting upon it.

“Made in America, with Microsoft Windows (look closely),” Steven Webster tweeted.
“@PeterrWLFC @ryandolan123 Macs are made on Windows which then allows android to be made on the mac. :)” user RBXcmn65 added.
It wasn’t totally clear whether the PC in question was running Windows XP or Windows 7, although most commenters were leaning toward Windows XP. It also wasn’t clear what application it was running. It’s certainly possible that Windows was being used to run electronic design automation (EDA) software, or some other embedded analysis program that Apple’s developer base has passed over.
What is clear, however, is that Apple’s airtight PR machine sprung a leak, and right from the very top. Ironically, Cook himself took some potshots at Microsoft during the Apple’s WWDC speech, mocking Microsoft for poor customer adoption of Windows 8 relative to OS X Mavericks.
“This is the fastest adoption ever of any PC operating system in history,” Cook said of Mavericks.

 Maybe so, but Apple’s assembly line could certainly use a copy.

eBay study warns search ads have 'no measurable benefit'

Customers are just as likely to click on natural search results as paid ads, a US study has found, raising questions about the efficacy of the multi-billion dollar search advertising market

Adverts in search engines have "no measurable benefits" to the advertiser, researchers at eBay claim in a paper published in conjunction with Berkeley and Chicago universities.
The auction site gave its own researcher Thomas Blakey, as well as Chicago's Chris Nosko and Berkeley's Steven Tadelis, the ability to experiment with how and when the company bought search adverts.
The researchers found that most search adverts on most search terms had very little affect on sales at all – and warn that the medium may be "beyond the peak of its efficacy."
Many companies buy adverts on searches for their brand. eBay, for instance, may buy adverts on searches for the term "eBay", as well as for terms such as "eBay shoes". But confirming what customers have long suspected, those adverts do little other than encourage users to click on the advert where they would otherwise have clicked on the normal search result to the same site.
"The results show that almost all of the forgone click traffic and attributed sales were captured by natural search," the researchers found.
"That is, substitution between paid and unpaid traffic was nearly complete. Shutting off paid search ads closed one (costly) path to a company's website but diverted traffic to natural search, which is free to the advertiser."

Generic search results do better

The researchers had slightly better news for advertisers who buy space on search results for generic terms, such as "memory", "cell phone" or "used gibson les paul".
"Unlike branded search, where a firm's website is usually in the top organic search slot, organic placement for non-branded terms vary widely," meaning that a site can't guarantee it will show up on the front page for a search term unless it pays.
But the researchers wanted to test whether dropping off the front page for generic terms actually matters to sales.
Working with eBay, they stopped advertising entirely on non-branded search terms to 30% of the US for a period of 60 days, and found that it had "a very small and statistically insignificant effect on sales… on average, US consumers do not shop more on eBay when they are exposed to paid search ads."

eBay customers 'unaffected by the presence of paid search advertising'

Looking further, they found that the ads did have an affect on a subset of eBay users: those who had only just signed up for an account, or who had made fewer than three transactions.
"Consumers who have completed at least three eBay transactions in the year before our experiment are likely to be familiar with eBay's offerings and value proposition, and are unaffected by the presence of paid search advertising," they conclude.
The findings raise significant questions about the value of the search advertising market.
"Of the $31.7bn that was spent in the US in 2011 on internet advertising, estimates project that the top 10 spenders in this channel account for about $2.36bn… our study suggests that much of what is spent on internet advertising may be beyond the peak of its efficacy."
Google is the biggest seller of search adverts in the world. In 2013, the company made $37bn from its various websites, a full two thirds of its gross revenue. The company doesn't break down revenue beyond that, but it is believed that the majority of its income comes from search advertising.

Asus Transformer Book V takes functionality to the extreme with five modes

ASUS introduced an Android phone that doubles as a Windows tablet. (Yeah, really.) Have a look at the five-mode Transformer Book

Wireless charging for phablets, tablets gets a Computex debut

Wireless charger maker PowerbyProxi will demonstrate what it calls "the next evolution of resonant wireless charging" at Computex 2014 this week.

The company plans to show off a 7.5-watt, highly resonant charging system for thin-form devices, such as smartphones and phablets, that can also be expanded to 15 watts for tablets.

Previously, PowerbyProxi's wireless charging devices offered 3.5-to-5 watts of power.

PowerbyProxi is a component company, so the wireless chargers it plans to demonstrate are proofs of concept. The company has partnerships with companies such as Samsung, Texas Instruments (TI) and Linear who choose to build the technology based on the working prototypes.

The new system - a bowl and an updated box into which enabled mobile devices can be placed -- is designed to deliver up to 15W of power to a single tablet, or multiple smartphones and phablets. Ultimately this will be backwards compatible with the Wireless Power Consortium's (WPC) Qi (pronounced "chee") standard and forward compatible to resonant v1.2.

"We continue to drive advances in wireless charging technology," Greg Cross, CEO of PowerbyProxi, said in a statement. "Our contributions to the future specification of the Qi 1.2 standard, will enable better performance and more convenient solutions for consumers."

For the first time, PowerbyProxi will also demonstrate a wireless charging pad for mobile devices that enables vertical height charging of up to about one and a quarter inches.

Cross said the added distance will enable charging capabilities to be integrated into public locations like restaurants and hotels, as well as furniture and countertops. Charging can occur through materials including wood, plastic and composites, along with the ability to charge multiple devices within a designated area.

PowerbyProxi's new wireless charging bowl transmitter is designed to charge smaller, personal devices -- including wearables -- and devices using AA batteries that can receive a wireless charge. Devices can be placed in any position or orientation, even on top of each other. The bowl, which measures about 4-in. in diameter, offers a sleek design and comes in several colors.

​What is a desktop? New designs will change home computing, says Intel

Dell Inspiron 20 3000

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- From cheaper All-in-Ones to mini PCs, Intel has told Computex a wide range of new PC designs will grow the market for computers around the typical home.

There has already been growth in PC sales in 2014, driven by factors such as the end of XP. NPD data saw March 2014 deliver 16 percent growth year-on-year in the desktop category. Intel thinks a lot of users might be looking to swap their old computers not just for the same big box and screen, but something different. And there's plenty of different coming soon.

New, lower-powered chips are set to increase the range of All-in-One (AIO) PC options in the market, with Intel predicting a 50 percent increase in the number of available designs. This includes a mix of portable and stationary AIO products, including lay-flat options and battery powered designs. In a shift from typical entry pricing in the US$849 to US$999 range, Intel expects to see new AIO price points starting from US$599 (£359, AU$649).

For this year's 'Back to School' season in North America and Europe, Intel also predicts we will see Baytrail-D powered AIO computers starting from as low as US$349 (£209). That compares with pricing from US$499 (£299) around the same time last year.

Alongside these AIO designs, Intel points to 2.5x growth in the mini PC market since 2012. Right now Intel is tracking 20 designs in this space across partner organisations. This includes computers like the Intel NUC, Apple Mac Mini, Asus Chromebox, HP Chromebox and the Gigabyte Brix. Intel expects we will see a lot of very compact, highly powered devices popping up over the course of this year.

Intel expects such mini PC boxes to be capable of acting as media centres, gaming PCs, home hubs, personal clouds, as well as serving many commercial applications.

We're already seeing some of these new approaches and price points, like the Dell Inspiron 20 3000, here at Computex. No doubt we'll have more as we continue to explore the show floor.

How to Buy a Laptop

The laptop market has undergone major changes in the last few years, and there may be more confusion in the notebook aisle today than at any other time. The current selection of mobile PCs encompasses everything from featherweight ultrabooks that barely tip the scales at less than 2 pounds, to lap-crushing behemoths of 10 pounds or more.
The look of a typical laptop has undergone a transformation, with dozens of convertible designs that rethink the standard clamshell to take advantage of touch interfaces. Some systems double as tablets, with hinges that bend and fold, while other touch PCs are actually slate tablets that come with accessory keyboards for laptop-style use. There's simply too much variety in the notebook space for one size or style to fit every person's needs.
That's where this buying guide comes in. We'll brief you on all the newest styles and features, and parse the latest buzzwords and trends, helping you figure out which features you want, and how to find the laptop that's right for you.
Ultrabooks and Ultraportables
Walk down any laptop aisle and you'll notice that the selection has gotten dramatically thinner and sleeker. Intel has spent the last few years pushing ultrabooks, a breed of laptop that combines svelte, lightweight designs with the latest energy-efficient hardware and long-lasting batteries to produce a system that delivers productivity with the sort of portability that old bulky clamshell designs could never offer.
Ultrabooks took the ultraportable category and refined it with industry-wide standards governing everything from boot times to chassis thickness—no more than 22mm (0.79 inch) thick for units with screens smaller than 14 inches. Dubbed ultrabooks, these wafer-thin systems represent a new vision for portable computing, a no-compromises laptop light enough that you'll forget it's in your briefcase, whose battery and storage let it resume work in seconds after being idle or asleep for days. Solid-state drives (SSD)—whether a full 128GB or 256GB SSD or, more affordably, a small one used as a cache with a traditional hard drive—give ultrabooks their quick start and resume capabilities. In the last year, these slim portable systems have gone from being the exception to being the rule, with dozens of new ultrabooks offered by every major PC manufacturer.
Most importantly, the slim designs ushered in by the push for ultrabooks has resulted in a general slimming down of the entire laptop category. Whether you're looking at ultraportables that are carefully designed to be sliver thin, or mainstream PCs and even gaming machines, the entire laptop category is thinner, lighter, and better suited to life on the go. The best of these ultraportables will still cost you a pretty penny, but the performance they offer is remarkable, and they often come with several high-end features to boot. The Acer Aspire S7-392-6411$1,571.95 at Office Depot, for example, is only a half-inch thick, yet still manages to offer a 1080p touch screen, a full-size HDMI port, and more than 8 hours of battery life. The similarly long-lasting Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus$1,241.00 at Amazon takes things even further, with an astonishing 3,200-by-1,800 resolution screen.
Windows 8 and Touch
The most dramatic change to come to the PC in the last couple of years is Windows 8. If you haven't spent anytime with a new Windows PC of late, you may be a bit disoriented by the new interface that's focused on touch-based interaction. Windows 8 is meant to bridge the gap between laptops and tablets. It does that by introducing a new navigation scheme, a tile-based Start Screen that replaces the traditional Start Menu, and an app-friendly software environment. There's more to Windows 8 than can be addressed in this buying guide, but the bottom line is that new operating system has brought touch interface to the forefront. As a result, the majority of new PCs also feature a touch screen, and those that don't will have features in place to provide similar functionality.
If you're in the market for a Windows 8 laptop, a touch screen is highly recommended. Even entry-level models, like the Acer Aspire E1-510P-2671 $359.99 at Amazon or the Toshiba Satellite NB15t-A1304$379.00 at Microsoft Store, feature touch displays, and the Windows 8 user experience is dramatically more intuitive when using it with touch input. The one area where you won't see many touch screens is among gaming machines, where touch would potentially interfere with the precision control schemes needed on the gaming grid.
Hybrid Laptop Designs
This emphasis on touch has done more than encourage the adoption of touch screens. In a further effort to enter the tablet market while still meeting the needs of laptop buyers, a new category of laptop/tablet hybrid has emerged. These new convertible hybrid laptop designs can transform from laptop to tablet and back again, some by way of specialized folding hinges, like the flip-and-fold hinge of the HP Pavilion x360 or the innovative Ezel hinge of the Acer Aspire R7-572-6423$884.77 at Amazon.
Other systems allow you to dock a tablet PC with an accessory keyboard for laptop-like functionality, like the Asus Transformer Book T100TA (64GB) $349.99 at Quill, or the Sony VAIO Tap 11 $569.00 at Amazon. Some of these hybrid designs offer docking keyboards, with secondary batteries providing all-day charge, while others opt for Bluetooth keyboards, forgoing the bulk of a docking hinge and connecting wirelessly.
Mainstream and Premium
While the entire laptop category has gotten slimmer, there's still a market for the desktop replacement and laptops that blend premium design and function. Desktop replacements aren't quite as portable as smaller ultrabooks, but these 14- and 15-inch laptops offer everything you need for day-to-day computing. Systems like the Acer Aspire V3-772G-9460 $1,363.63 at Amazon offer larger displays, a broader selection of ports and features, and are one of the few categories that still come with built-in optical drives.
While many PC manufacturers have moved en masse to the ultrabook category, Apple hasn't abandoned the desktop replacement, with the ultra-high-resolution display of the Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch (2013)$1,849.99 at Amazon becoming the new standard for high-quality graphics. This sort of 1080p+ display is also showing up in Windows laptops, like the Dell XPS 15 (9530)$1,999.99 at Dell, which boasts an astonishing 3,200-by-1,800 resolution screen and premium carbon fiber construction.
Media and Gaming
There has been a lot of hand wringing among industry experts and pundits over the last several months as laptop and desktop sales have started to decline, and tablet sales have expanded to fill the gap, but gaming PCs have actually sold more. For the gamer who wants top-of-the-line performance, the combination of a high-end processor, a potent discrete graphics card, and a large, high-resolution display is well worth the higher prices that gaming rigs frequently command. And, boy, do those prices run high—for instance, the Origin EON17-SLX (2014) is priced over $3,500, and even entry-level gaming systems like the MSI GX70 3Be-007US$1,434.99 at RadioShack will cost $1,400 or more.

Before you drop a grand or two on a gaming laptop, however, you should know what you're getting for your money. Powerful quad-core processors are par for the course, with Intel Core i7 and AMD A10 chips pushing serious performance even for non-gaming applications. Discrete GPUs from Nvidia and AMD provide silky smooth graphics and impressive framerates. The Origin EON17-SLX has two GPUs, helping justify its high price tag. Additional features to watch for include high-resolution displays offering 1080p resolution or better, and hard drives that offer 1TB or more of local storage space, letting you store your entire game library on the machine.

Not all gaming laptops are hulking beasts, however. The sleek designs of ultrabooks have given rise to a new breed of portable gaming machine that puts gaming-level performance into a more portable design. These gaming ultraportables, like the Razer Blade (2013) $1,977.98 at Amazon, draw inspiration from ultrabooks, and offer the same sort of thin dimensions and long-lasting battery life. But, just like other gaming rigs, this sort of performance doesn't come cheap, with gaming ultraportables running in the $2,000 range.

The Windows 8 Kill Switch: A Hacker's Dream Come True

A number of stories about a Windows 8 kill switch have appeared on the Web, each with its own odd and ominous tone. The blogosphere has gone berserk with all sorts of menacing commentary, such as the following from the Vigilent Citizen:

The very anticipated operating system Windows 8 will have a feature that was never found on PC's before: A kill switch that can remotely delete software and edit code without the user's permission. Although Microsoft claims the switch would only be used for software that is downloaded from its app store, no official policies clearly define the actual purpose of the kill switch... nothing is truly considered "illegal" and that includes issues regarding spying, censorship and free speech.

Pretty scary, kids. Less-than-totally-freaked-out Computerworld has this to say:

Kill switches -- so called because a simple command can deactivate or delete an app -- are common in mobile app stores. Both Apple and Google can flip such a switch for apps distributed by the iOS App Store and Android Market, respectively.

In the Windows Store terms of use, Microsoft made it clear that it can pull the kill switch at its discretion.

The more I read, the more I wonder how so many people can miss the real danger this poses to the average user. I immediately ask, what happens if a hacker cracks the mechanism and can write some malicious code to brick millions of computers? Or worse, with all the already infected machines we know exist, what if their Trojan Horse overlords simply call up the bricking code to hide their tracks?



There are a lot of possibilities here and a heck of a lot of them are more worrisome than thinking that Microsoft may pull the kill switch to shut up someone who hates Steve Ballmer.
In fact, nobody has even mentioned the national security threat that this suggests. First of all, Microsoft is not known for designing anything secure. The company cannot do it. So, how does adding a kill switch keep users and the nation as a whole safe when we know in advance that it will be hacked like everything else the company has done?
Supposedly, the process is directed at apps or products that will be sold over the Web from the app store. This seems fine on the surface. Everybody seems to do this already. Amazon has such a feature on the Kindle and Google has one on its Android phones. Apple has comparable capabilities with the iPhone.
Nobody should be surprised by Microsoft's addition. For over a decade, people have discussed the idea that Microsoft could use the kill switch technology to kill bootleg or counterfeit versions of its OS. I'm sure the company would employ the code to kill counterfeits if it is confident it could get away with it and confident it wouldn't be bricking perfectly good systems left and right, thus finding itself in a legal entanglement and a public relations nightmare.
You all know the company has had meetings about this and no engineers have been able to guarantee that it would work as advertised.
This backlash fear will not deter a hacker who just wants to have fun. It will not discourage a foreign belligerent who wants to disrupt the US infrastructure. The game changes quick when this capability falls into the wrong hands.
One must assume that this global consideration is on the minds of the enemies of the state since President Obama has openly discussed how his "Internet Kill Switch" plan is a solid safety precaution if the Web is attacked. Shutting down the Web, in itself, seems like the ultimate attack. Just as killing a man because he has the flu is not a cure, killing the Internet is not a solution to anything.
So, here we are with a very threatening technology now being employed by Microsoft. This is going to be rich. I'll be watching.

Hopefully, within the next few years, my column will only be available for reading in print on paper stapled to a few select telephone poles. Keep an eye out in Berkeley and San Francisco.